2012.10.11 23:09

Its a creeping featurism! No, its a feeping creaturism! No, its an infestation of Feature Faeries! No, its Fedora!

I’ve been passively watching this thread (link to thread list) on the Fedora development list and I just can’t take anymore. I can’t bring myself to add to the symphony, either, because it won’t do any good — people with big money have already funded people with big egos to push forward with the castration of Fedora, come what may. So I’m writing a blog post way out here in the wilds of the unread part of the internet instead, mostly to satisfy my own urge to scream. Even if alone in the woods. Into a pillow. Inside a soundproof vault.

I already wrote an article about the current efforts to neuter Unix, so I won’t completely rehash all of that here. But its worth noting that the post about de-Nixing *nix generated a lot more support than hatred. When I write about political topics I usually get more hate mail than support, so this was unique. “But Unix isn’t politics” you might naively say — but let’s face it, the effort to completely re-shape Unix is nothing but politics; there is very little genuinely new or novel tech going on there (assloads of agitation, no change in temperature). In fact, that has ever been the Unix Paradox — that most major developments are political, not technical in nature.

So, in other words, all our existing log analysis tools have to be modified if they are to be of any use in Fedora 18?

In a word, yes. But what is really happening is that we will have to replace all existing *nix admins or at a minimum replace all of their training and habits. Most of the major movement within Fedora from about a year ago is an attempt to un-nix everything about Linux as we know it, and especially as we knew it as a descendant in the Unix tradition. If things keep going the way they are OS X might wind up being more “traditional” than Fedora in short order (never thought I’d write that sentence — so that’s why they say “never say ‘never'”).

Log files won’t even be really plain text anymore? And not “just” HTML, either, but almost definitely some new illegible form of XML by the time this is over — after all, the tendency toward laughably obfuscated XML is almost impossible to resist once angle brackets have made their way into any format for any reason. Apparently having log files sorted in Postgres wasn’t good enough.

How well will this sit with embedded systems, existing utilities, or better, embedded admins? It won’t, and they aren’t all going to get remade. Can you imagine hearing phrases like this and not being disgusted/amused/amazed: “Wait, let me fire up a browser to check what happened in the router board that only has a serial terminal connection can’t find its network devices”; or even better, “Let me fire up a browser to check what happened in this engine’s piston timing module”?

Unless Fedora derived systems completely take over all server and mobile spaces (and hence gain the “foist on the public by fiat” advantage Windows has enjoyed in spite of itself) this evolutionary branch is going to become marginalized and dumped by the community because the whole advantage of being a *nix admin was that you didn’t have to retrain everything every release like with Windows — now that’s out the window (oops, bad pun).

There was a time when you could pretty well know what knowledge was going to be eternal (and probably be universal across systems, or nearly so) and what knowledge was going to change a bit per release. That was always one of the biggest cultural differences between Unix and everything else. But those days are gone, at least within Fedoraland.

The original goals for systemd (at least the ones that allegedly sold FESCO on it) were to permit parallel service boot (biggest point of noise by the lead developer initially, with a special subset of this noise focused around the idea of Fedora “going mobile” (advanced sleep-states VS insta-boot, etc.)) and sane descendant process tracking (second most noise and a solid idea), with a little “easy to multi-seat” on the side to pacify everyone else (though I’ve seen about zero evidence of this actually getting anywhere yet). Now systemd goals and features have grown to cover everything to include logging. The response from the systemd team would likely be”but how can it not include logging?!?” Of course, that sort of reasoning is how you get monolithic chunk projects that spread like cancer. Its ironic to me that when systemd was introduced HAL was held up as such a perfect example of what not to do when writing a sub-system specifically because it became such an octopus — but at least HAL stayed within its govern-device-thingies bounds. I have no idea where the zone of responsibility for systemd starts and the kernel or userland begins anymore. That’s quite an achievement.

And there has been no end to resistance to systemd, and not just because of init script changeover and breakages. There have been endless disputes about the philosophy underlying its basic design. But don’t let that stop anybody and make them think. Not so dissimilar to the Gnome3/Unity flop.

I no longer see a future where this distro and its commercially important derivative is the juggernaut in Linux IT — particularly since it really won’t be Linux as we understand it, it will be some other operating system running atop the same kernel.

Come to think of it, changing the kernel would go over better than making all these service and subsystem changes — because administrators and users would at least still know what was going on for the most part and with a change in kernel the type of things that likely would be different (services) would be expected and even well-received if they represented clear improvements over whatever had preceded them.

Consider how similar administering Debian/Hurd is to administering Debian/Linux, or Arch/Hurd is to administering Arch/Linux. And how similar AIX and HP/UX are to administering, say, RHEL 6. We’re making such invasive changes through systemd that a change of kernel from a monolothic to a microkernel is actually more sensible — after all, most of the “wrangle services atop a kernel a new way” ideas are already managed a more robust way as part of the kernel design, not as an intermediate wonder-how-it’ll-work-this-week subsystem.

Maybe that is simpler. But it doesn’t matter, because this is about deliberately divisive techno politicking on one side (in the vain hope that “if our wacko system dominates the market, we’ll own the training market by default even if Scientific Linux and CentOS still dominate in raw numbers!”), and ego masturbation on the other (“I’ll be such a rebel if I shake up the Unix community by repeatedly deriding so-called ‘UnixÂ traditions‘ as outdated superstitions and generally giving the Unix community the bird!”) on the other.

Here’s a guide to predicting the most likely outcomes:

To read the future history* of how these efforts work out as a business tactic, check the history of Unix from the mid-1980’s to early 2000’s and see how well “diversification” in the interest of carving out corporate empires works. I find it strikingly suitable that political abuse of language has found its way into this effort — conscious efforts at diversification (defined as branching away from every other existing system, even your own previous releases) is always performed under the label of “standardization” or “conformance to existing influences and trends”. Har har. Joke’s on you, though, Fedora. (*Yeah, its already written, so you can just read this one. Easy.)

To predict the future history of a snubbed Unix community, consider that the Unix community is so used to getting flipped the bird by commercial interests that lose their way that it banded together to write Linux and the entire GNU constellation from scratch. Consider also that the original UNIX was started by developers who were snubbed and felt ill at ease with another, related system whose principal flaw was (ironically) none other than the same featuritis the Linux community is now enduring.

I don’t see any future where Fedora succeeds in any of its logarithmically expanding goals as driven by Red Hat. And with that, I don’t see a bright future for Red Hat beyond v7 if they don’t get this and other priorities sorted**. As a developer who wishes for the love of everything holy that I could just focus on developing consumer business applications, I’m honestly sad to say that I’m having to look for a new “main platform” to develop for, because this goose looks about cooked.

** (sound still doesn’t work reliably — Ekiga is broken out of the box, Skype is owned by Microsoft now — Fedora/Red Hat don’t have a prayer at getting on mobile (miracles aside) — nobody is working on anything solid to stand a business on once the “cloud” dream bubble pops — virtualization is already way overinvested in and done better elsewhere already anyway — easy-to-fix media issues aren’t being looked at — a new init system makes everything above worse, not better, and is distracting and requires admins to completely retrain besides…)